A Real-World Guide to Purposeful Leadership

Intro

Leadership can be exhilarating. When the team is winning, it feels incredible. When team members express their excitement for the mission, it is deeply satisfying. When customers are sending accolades, you are overwhelmingly proud.

At its foundation, however, leadership is about accepting responsibility. It’s about being ultimately accountable for the productivity of a group creating much more than you could alone.

If you are in a leadership role, this series is intended for you.

The Agenda

This is a “table of contents” for this series. Feel free to read through or just give it a glance. I’ll dive more deeply into each one in the coming months!

Knowing Why We Lead

The reason we lead becomes the foundation for how we lead, ultimately determining what will come from our leadership. While our real motivations may be deep, nuanced, and even hidden, the business goals of leadership tend to be pretty straightforward.

There are many times, however, when we need to push through hard work. Ultimately, our reason for doing the work needs to come from something deeper.

Knowing our own personal motivation to lead is imperative.

Setting a Vision

To lead, you need to point your people in a common direction. Your team is undoubtedly a group of problem-solvers who fundamentally want to do a good job, and the best thing you can do is name the problem you want them to solve. Declare the vision. Tell them where you need them to go. By starting with a declaration of where you want to end up, you tap the power of multiple great brains figuring out how to get there.

Leading Through Listening

In my experience, the Vision should be co-created and not handed down “from up high.” If you are leading the entire organization, it’s critical that you tap into the diverse input of your team and lean into their collective wisdom.

Accountability, Authority, and Negotiation

Accountability is not a directive activity coming from “up high.” It is the two-way process of negotiating commitments against resources that include the level of authority that is being granted. Accountability improves over time in a learning organization. Debriefs that identify root causes to both positive and negative results are an essential tool for continuous improvement. When the organization and each team member demonstrate competency in incorporating those learnings, accountability thrives.

Annual Planning

Annual Planning is a foundational leadership exercise. I get pretty tactical on this latest Flannel CEO post and walk through how we did it at Critical Insight, leaning into the prior discussions on "Accountability" and "Leading through Listening" to make a Vision come to life through a well-designed organization with a clear plan.

Frontline Flannel

If you are a frontline leader, you may not have the authority of the CEO. Regardless, you have a team of people working with you that also crave purpose, structure, and vision. Your leadership at your level remains critical. Use your tools there.

The Drumbeat of Recurring Rituals

Recurring rituals within a flexible Performance Cycle can establish the “measure” of music in your organization, allowing a “drumbeat” in which your team’s work comes to life. The right time signature creates a rhythm that allows the team to improvise the human “jazz” of designing, creating, constructing, and innovating within their work.

Congruent Compensation

Compensation is one of the quickest ways to mess up a system that is otherwise thoughtful, mission-driven, and high-performing! We want economic pressures to fade into the background by aligning compensation structures to our intrinsic motivations. Since we are working from a Vision, a Plan, and ideally a breakdown of Departmental Plans and Team Plans, we already have the key components to design aligned roles, salaries, and any variable pay.

Leadership Styles: Their Uses and Pitfalls

Leaders utilize a variety of styles. Some are better for small teams while others create thriving, motivated organizations at scale. Most importantly, a great Leader adapts their approach to each situation, wearing the right hat at the right time.

Vitality During Duress: How a Start-Up Can End Up

Upholding your vitality is implicitly part of your job description. This not-so-tall tale about short runways talks about the stress of bringing a start-up in for a landing to illustrate the importance of managing your state of mind when facing massive challenges.

Taking Care of Your Physical Health

One of a four-part series on various types of health: physical, financial, digital, and mental. Nothing in these sections will be new ideas. They are best practices discussed deeply in numerous books, articles, and workshops created by other authors. I summarize and repeat them because great leadership requires vitality, and yours must be foundationally based in a commitment to sustaining health across multiple domains.

Taking Care of Your Financial Health

This is article two of a four-part series on four types of health for vitality.

Taking Care of Your "Digital Health"

This is article three of a four-part series on four types of health for vitality.

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